Post navigation

George R. Stewart, Space Explorer

Say what? GRS a space explorer, decades before we had humans in space? How so?

In Ordeal By Hunger and Storm, Stewart writes the view from space into the work. The Ordeal By Hunger entry is especially interesting. He describes the view of northern Nevada along the California Trail so precisely that in the NASA days when I asked Astronaut Dr. Ed Lu to photograph it on ISS Expedition 7, and had the passage sent to him, the photos that came back showed how accurately Stewart had visualized the space explorer’s view – 25 years before any human actually saw it for themselves.

Storm begins and ends with a view of Earth from space – the opening passages, like those in Ordeal By Hunger, give a view from near space. The closing passages move farther out, into the solar system, where he gives the view from Venus.

Interestingly, he changed the space-perspective section in Ordeal By Hunger for the second edition; but once humans had gone into space, he put the original back.

He was a pioneer in the Whole Earth Perspective, including the close view from within the ecosystem here on Earth, and the overview, the Astronaut’s View, from Low Earth Orbit. So it seemed to make sense to use him as a model for a new way to interpret the Earth and educate others about it. When the opportunity came to present a teacher’s workshop at a Mars Conference, in 1998, I used that theme. Accidentally, today, I came upon that workshop paper in researching another talk. The paper lists all the resources for space education, many now gone, available to teachers in 1998. GRS wanders into the paper on page 8.